Well, noise is related to your camera’s ISO and sensor. A high ISO makes your camera more sensitive to light and therefore more susceptible to acquiring a higher amount of noise.One of the new DeNoise 5 features is a debanding tab on the user interface, used to remove banding noise from images. This new debanding technology tackles dual-directional banding noise, eliminating the long lines that extend across images and restoring image color, detail and integrity.

Our development team has been working hard to bring you version 5.1 of Topaz DeNoise, which includes a new and polished user interface. If you already own DeNoise then this is a free upgrade.

This should be more than a credit but a free upgrade for life as promised for. ANd all of the other 13 programs going into Studio as well. I understand why Topaz wants to rename something and say it's different, but it just is not.

It will be free, and so will the remaining 11 plugins, just like the first four were. When Denoise is ported into Studio owners of the plugin will get it free. Furthermore, Denoise is a collection of adjustments, one of which happens to be Reduce Noise. The Reduce Noise adjustment in Studio may well be an improvement to that particular adjustment, but it's only one part of Denoise. It just most emphatically is.

However, I would like to use, in some cases, Studio's Layer/Masking with noise removal instead of jumping out of Studio to PS.

Why not just call DeNoise from within Studio rather than go back to PS? When you close DeNoise, it will create a new image along the ribbon at the bottom. You can then add that image as a layer via the Image Adjustment and include masking as needed.

The products are not 1:1, and we won't give anything less to our existing customers. As others have pointed out, you can still access DeNoise from the Plugins menu of Topaz Studio. You will get the update for free, when it is ready for release.

Yes, it is becoming better understood now that RN is a subset of DN. I thought that activating RN for current DN owners would allow us to do (limited) NR within the Studio framework...while waiting for the full DN port to come later. When you access legacy DN from the plug-in menu it is somewhat more cumbersome to do masking/layering.

We're in transition, and are focusing heavily on quality. There are several products, like Adjust, DeNoise, and ReMask, that have a high performance bar to meet. We aren't going to release an update to these products until we're SURE they're ready.

We aren't going to release an update to these products until we're SURE they're ready.

That's not what I was asking for (DeNoise update)...all I was floating was for the Pro-Adjustment check to see if the CU owns DeNoise it would go ahead and activate Reduce Noise in the interim. Not implying that they are the same tool - we know they are not.

If that were to complicate the verification code, I guess It could also be done at the CU Account level per request, too. Analogous to the car dealer loaning you a Corolla while you wait on your Lexus repair.

I believe those terms are interchangeable. If you click on the Adjustments menu, Image Layer is down at the bottom. Likewise, if you click on the blue&white Adjustments button on the righthand panel, Image Layer is also at the bottom. If you hover your mouse over the Image icon to the right of that Adjustments button, it calls it Image Adjustment, but they're all the same thing. Selecting any of them adds a layer with an empty image box; just drag and drop one of the images you have open. You can add a mask and set blending mode just like with any other adjustment layers.

For me, this works well in my workflow based on LR 5.7. A very common process I do is run B&W Effects which returns a new image back to Studio. I then add an image layer to my original and blend with soft light or luminosity, for example. Sometimes, different blend modes work better on different parts of the image. In such a case, I duplicate the image returned from B&W and add it twice in two separate image layers, choose different blending modes in combination with masking to apply the different blending to different parts of the image.

When DeNoise is upgraded and migrated to Studio in the public release, the Pro functions for the Reduce Noise Adjustment would be activated for owners of DeNoise. In the meantime, owners of Denoise can activate it from the Plug-in list. The Pro functions of Reduce Noise can be activated in the Beta version by downloading a trial copy and hopefully the upgrade will come through before the trial runs out. As always, upgrades are free.

I was floating was for the Pro-Adjustment check to see if the CU owns DeNoise it would go ahead and activate Reduce Noise in the interim.

We will not be doing this, for a number of reasons. Many of the Adjustments included in Studio are missing critical features, which will be a huge problem for anyone that expects the same feature set from an upgrade we provide. Further, we'd have to split up the update into different release periods, severely complicating our intended upgrade process for our 15+ products. Also, we're a small team of just 11 (gained +1 this week!), so our bandwidth is quite limited. Our release schedule is currently set so that we may complete the majority of our goals for 2017. DeNoise is not on that list. We have a couple more updates slated for the more immediate term, with another update on its heels, as well as new adjustment types. We don't want to release anything prematurely, even if it requires us asking our customers to patiently wait for their free update. It's easy to get FOMO when you see there's something you don't have paid access to, but Studio is designed in such a way that any product you currently own (DeNoise is a great example) is going to be much more powerful and complete than any single Adjustment type in Studio. The sole exception to this is Impression, so far, due to its unique processing style. We couldn't really break that one down much, but we're exploring ways to improve this transition process, so it makes more sense to everyone.

We did our best to reduce the confusion that poor naming conventions can create (DeNoise → Reduce Noise, B&W Effects → Black and White). These Adjustments are components, and we aren't going to pretend that the components that aren't ready, are ready, which means we're not extending free updates just yet, for some products. Sure, waiting is a bummer, but I'd like to provide a bit of context to our current update schedule compared to where it was a year ago. In the last 12 months, Studio (and other plugins) have received a total of >45 updates. In the preceding 12 months, we managed to release a total of ~20 updates. The updates I'm counting include major updates (Texture Effects 1 → Texture Effects 2, Glow 1 → Glow 2), as well as minor/maintenance updates to fix bugs that were reported to us.

We'll continue to refine our processes, make cool stuff, and keep our free update promise. One of the compromises with the free update promise is that you have to take the update in the form we provide it. We believe this is fair, as long as we refrain from reducing the functionality of the updated version. From what we can tell, none of our competitors are offering free updates, nor have they ever. We're very proud of this, but we want to make sure the update is worth integrating into your workflow, before we provide it. New and existing users alike should want to use our tools. We aren't going to give you a free update because we "have to", and we're not going to give you a free update that we're not proud enough to sell on the market. It's a balancing act, for sure, and we're doing our best. If we're falling short somewhere, point it out, and we'll work on it.

Ok, consider the request retracted. To me it didn't seem that complicated, but obviously I was mistaken.

PS I'm not really looking for anything "free"...I just am disinclined to re-purchase a closely related subset in order to work entirely within Studio. But, I can work-around that...no problem. For example, I recently purchased Dehaze-Pro. I may or may not have been able to recreate similar functionality in my current plug-ins, but it wasn't really worth my time to work it out.

No, Reduce Noise is one of the adjustments that make up Denoise - it's part of it.

Yes, RN a sub-set...we get that. However, are you stating that once DN is migrated into Studio then Reduce Noise will live on as an Adjustment? Kind of like Impressions-Studio currently co-exists with Adjustsments->Impression?

are you stating that once DN is migrated into Studio then Reduce Noise will live on as an Adjustment?

Yes. Just like Basic Adjustment, Precision Contrast and HSL Colour Tuning, the three adjustments that make up Clarity, still live on as individual adjustments. If you don't have the Reduce Noise adjustment then you don't have the full Denoise functionality. Trust me, it WILL all become clear. As I said much earlier, Denoise is a collection of a number of adjustments, of which Reduce Noise is but one. If you open Denoise you'll see those adjustments.